Cameras follow every move. The articulate, energetic man, aided by a skilled filmmaker using evocative imagery, distills a momentous but complicated issue to digestible sound bites, jabs at his ideological and intellectual antagonists and delivers an illustrated lecture to a rapt audience.

This description could easily fit former Vice President Al Gore and the film crew that shot “An Inconvenient Truth.” But now it also fits Bjorn Lomborg, the self-described “skeptical environmentalist” who is the focus of (and a co-writer of) “Cool It,” a new documentary that is clearly trying to be a counterpunch to the Gore film.

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The prime theme of “Cool It,” taken from Lomborg’s book of the same name, is that global warming is a serious problem but that raising the cost of polluting forms of energy is a highly inefficient solution.

I’m a Democrat, I was a page in the U.S. Senate. I’m not against Gore… The anti-‘Inconvenient Truth’ would say global warming is not happening. The reason I wanted to make the film is the pragmatic solutions that he puts forward… Until alternative energies become less expensive, fossil fuels are never going to go away…. That’s my favorite point and I hope that’s what people take away from the film.

I hope she’s right, although my guess is a lot of viewers will focus on the conflict — and the jabs at the environmental left — more than the substance, where it exists. (I know. It’s a movie. How dare I ask for substance…)

In his book, Lomborg proposes that a modest carbon tax could pay for all of this work at a fraction the cost of a cap on emissions of greenhouse gases, the approach pursued by Europe under the Kyoto Protocol (and rejected in the United States).

Does the film succeed? “Cool It” is eminently watchable — which is no surprise given Timoner’s involvement. Lomborg, as always, is charming and persuasive, frequently shown riding his bicycle through Copenhagen’s busy streets — in what has to be seen as a dig at Gore, who in his film is often seen racing through airports.

But it suffers from the same simplification syndrome that weakened “An Inconvenient Truth.”

In that film, for example, Gore breezily concluded by saying, “We already know everything we need to know to effectively address this problem,” a phrase he modified in subsequent statements, saying existing technology was sufficient to start on the path to limit warming.

In “Cool It,” Lomborg breezily ticks down a laundry list of high-tech ways to engineer the atmosphere, for example, but punts on the tougher questions related to such planet-scale enterprises — such as the inevitable diplomatic dispute over who sets the planetary thermostat and how blocking the sun does nothing to stem the buildup of carbon dioxide, much of which will stay in the atmosphere for many centuries.

He proposes spending tens of billions of dollars (a bargain, he insists, compared to the hundreds of billions that would be spent on a cap-and-trade style approach), but he doesn’t say how he’d convince the United States or China to adopt the necessary carbon tax.

And he doesn’t deal with the full pipeline for innovation that is required to take a promising technology from idea to breakthrough. A greatly intensified research effort is a vital, but insufficient, facet of any plan to foster progress without disrupting the climate.

Its chiding tone in places is unlikely to build the sense of consensus and excitement around an energy quest that Lomborg seems to desire.

The film makes fun of British students exploring ways to save energy instead of pointing to such students — and education on the globe’s energy challenge — as a critical component of a strategy to foster progress without overheating the planet.

I would have loved to see Timoner explore the world’s energy challenge and opportunities without building her film around the tug of war between liberals and libertarians. I think there’s a way, but that’s easy for me to say.

I know. I’m an energy and climate wonk. The most compelling, even exciting, argument I’ve seen for the United States to engage in a sustained energy quest was that of Richard Smalley. The following video of Smalley making his presentation is funky and grainy, but, to my eye, more compelling than anything brought to movie screens so far.

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I’ll be posting a short interview I did with Lomborg about the film over the weekend, along with an open call for questions for him.

1:29 p.m. | Updated
Lomborg sent this initial reaction to the post:

The film doesn’t zero in on mechanisms to raise money for the solutions advocated, but focuses on the fact that we’re already willing to stomach a cost of around $200 billion to achieve very little (EU 20/20/20), so looks at ways to better allocate that.

Ideally for me the film would have been an hour longer and contained many more of the points I make in the book! :-)

Instead, this is a film that focuses strongly (and, I hope, powerfully) on the smart solutions, and I’ve shot extra videos for the movie’s website, DVD, YouTube, etc., that address points that didn’t fit in. So there’s a clip put out already that elaborates on my view of how the money can be raised, and there’s more such videos in the works on a range of other points.

I’ll be tracking down links to the ancillary content and will add them as I find them (or as you find them!).

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By 2050 or so, the human population is expected to pass nine billion. Those billions will be seeking food, water and other resources on a planet where humans are already shaping climate and the web of life. Dot Earth was created by Andrew Revkin in October 2007 -- in part with support from a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship -- to explore ways to balance human needs and the planet's limits.